http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2010/07/stumbling_across_a_rare_find_o.html
July 24, 2010
Jeff Baker
The symbol of the Oregon Country Fair is a peach. The logo looks a
little like a radish and a little like the cover of the Allman
Brothers' album "Eat a Peach." The peach usually is found somewhere
on the official fair poster every year. The fair guide is called the
Peach Pit.
This year's fair went off at the end of a heat wave that made Fern
Ridge Reservoir shimmer in the afternoon sun and turned the tips of
the grass in the fields around Veneta from green to dry brown. A
volunteer who told fairgoers where to park sipped water and said
"thank you for driving an earth-friendly car" when a Prius slid
silently into place. Some teenagers ate hash brownies out of a pan
while a family walked past them toward the main gate.
Inside the fair is a mix of fantasy and commerce, Narnia and Diagon
Alley. Whimsy reigns. A group of stilt walkers is called Great
Heights. The Yes You Canopy and the Morningwood Odditorium are both
in the Chela Mela Meadow, as is the Rebo Gazebo. Strawberry Lane runs
toward the Drum Tower and connects to Shady Lane and the Shady Grove
Stage. Origami is practiced in the Yew Are Here lounge. Peachi the
Dragon, a fair tradition, is a "peace-breathing path parade" that
snakes its way along the tree-shaded, craft-crowded boulevards.
For all its determined counterculturalism, its insistence on staying
true to its Renaissance Faire roots on the banks of the Long Tom
River, the fair has grown up. More than 40,000 people attended the
three-day event this year and injected millions into a local economy
that needs every dollar it can get. The parking lot looked no
different than the one at Autzen Stadium during a football game.
People dress up and paint their faces, they're excited and they want
to see something memorable, whether it's a man in a loincloth playing
a didgeridoo or a gray-haired woman wearing a bikini and a raccoon
tail dancing to a jam band. This is Oregon, not Indiana, and if the
country fair long ago evolved into a super-sized version of Saturday
Market, with the real action happening after hours, it's still
possible to have a pleasant experience.
There's no such thing as a free lunch at the Oregon Country Fair, a
hippie haven with several ATMs, but there were a few free books on a
table. It was the usual assortment of dog-eared children's books and
book club editions of Robert B. Parker mysteries, the stuff you'd see
at a garage sale. But in the same way that reading a newspaper's
classified ads is (or used to be) a way to take the pulse of a
community, browsing a table of forgotten books can reveal clues about
the place they're found. At the fair, a second look at one of the
tables revealed a mass-market paperback copy of "The Aristos" by John Fowles.
Score! "The Aristos" is probably the least-known major work by the
author of "The French Lieutenant's Woman," and finding a copy in good
condition made the tabbouleh from lunch go down a lot easier. It's a
collection of philosophical musings Fowles began writing during his
last year at Oxford and insisted on publishing after his first novel,
"The Collector," was a hit. He revised it extensively after its
initial publication, as he did his novel "The Magus."
"This book was first published against the advice of almost everyone
who read it," Fowles writes.
That's a great lead, an attention-grabber, but what got me was the
concluding paragraph of the preface. After telling his readers the
new edition is shorter, and, he hopes, clearer, Fowles writes: "One
other criticism of the first edition I fully deserved. There was an
irritating swarm of new-coined words. These I have almost completely
abolished."
Think about that. Fowles made up a bunch of words for "The Aristos"
and took them out when he revised it. The "irritating swarm" that
Fowles presumably enjoyed coining was now "almost completely
abolished." Not completely abolished. Almost completely. There had to
be a few stragglers that escaped his magnifying glass, and I started
looking for them as soon as I escaped the fairgrounds and found a shady tree.
Fowles' appearance at Portland Arts & Lectures in 1996 was the result
of a lengthy courtship by the staff of Literary Arts Inc., which puts
on the lecture series. The exchange of letters on file reveals that
Fowles was sent a book about wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest, a
gift he received with great pleasure. Barry Lopez wrote Fowles
offering a day at the coast or a walk in the mountains and enclosed a
remarkably accurate freehand sketch of the Northwest. Fowles wanted
to be taken "if not to a good nature reserve at least to a good seed
merchant," and his wish was granted when Lopez and others showed him
the Columbia River Gorge. On a short walk (Fowles was 70 and had
suffered a stroke several years earlier), they saw a wild orchid,
Calypso bulbosa, commonly known as fairy slipper.
Fowles was enchanted by the flower and referred to it repeatedly in
his talk, which had no theme and was a rambling series of
sometimes-brilliant digressions and paradoxes. When he was asked why
he revised "The Aristos" and "The Magus," Fowles barked "because they
weren't very good."
"The Aristos" is tough sledding. It's based on the writings of
Heraclitus and is a bluntly stated set of short paragraphs outlining
Fowles' views on freedom and individuality. He writes that he "does
not expect agreement" but doesn't seem much interested in
disagreement. There's also a whiff of condescension, as when he
explains that his definition of "contingent" is "used here, of
course, in the sense of 'conditional' or 'non-essential.'" Of course.
As for the made-up words, they're as scarce as cotton candy at the
Oregon Country Fair. Fowles makes much of a concept he calls "the
nemo." He defines it as "not only 'nobody' but the state of being
nobody -- 'nobodiness.'" He writes that "belief in an afterlife is an
ostrich attempt to cheat the nemo," a statement that might not
attract too many believers at the fair.
Fowles' long essay "The Tree" is coming back into print in September
with a new introduction by Lopez, who writes that he had to get up
and walk away from it several times because its "thought was as
stimulating as I could stand." "The Tree" is an attempt to define the
human relationship to nature, which Fowles believes is being lost, to
our great detriment. "The Tree" is everything "The Aristos" is not --
graceful, surprising and as inspiring as discovering a fairy slipper
on a forest floor or a paperback book at a country fair.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment